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Actually Star Trek *does* touch upon the subject of religion multiple times. Religion does indeed exist - but since Star Fleet regulations does not allow religion to influence it's operations, we rarely see it manifested in the series, other than as a convenient plot device. It's just simply not a big factor of the daily life on the Enterprise.

Matter Replication and Transmutation, and by extension nearly unlimited energy, is indeed essential for a Star Trek society. When nearly everything* can be provided on an when-I-need-it basis, capitalism does not work, since capitalism require scarcity.

As for how Earth could be united in a unified secular government, well, the official explanation is that thanks to Cochrane inventing the warp drive reactor in the mid 21st century, Vulcans appeared and helped the Earth gradually prepare for their new space age. It is not unthinkable that Earth itself will be run by a single government when you have humans on around 20 000 other planets, owned by the federation coalition. And while one shouldn't underestimate humanity's ability to quarrel with each other, one should neither ignore the xenophobic effect created when outsiders show up - especially if those outsiders are far more technologicly advanced than us.

* The only thing lacking would be living matter such as pets and humans.

Sure they do, especially if customers are using the result of the work, a song in this case. If you drink lemonade from a lemonade stand, you need to pay for the drink. Making lemonade is no guarantee of income to the lemonade owner, but if he finds a customer, he needs to get paid.

Ah, the old "Unauthorized copying is theft" fallacy. No, unauthorized copying is not theft, have never been theft and won't ever be theft, no matter how much you want it to. Even SCOTUS has confirmed that in the landmark ruling Dowling vs. US, 1985.

Unauthorized copying is a violation of rights, but it is much more akin to trespassing than anything else. It's like this. Imagine there is a lake. The lake has a beach. The beach and the lake itself is public property, but all the land around it is farmlands and thus private property, so the only way to (legally) get to the beach is by air. Those darn local people though, they do not wish to hire a helicopter ride over there. They'd rather just like to walk on the outskirts of some of that private property so they can get to the lake and enjoy a nice, cozy swim in the summer heat.

These people, trespassing on the private property just in order to be able to take a dip they, in fact, are entitled to, are technicly commiting a crime - but they do not harm any land by walking over that property, and they do not disturb anyone by simply walking. Depending on where you are from, this is even legal in some countries, provided certain rules are followed.

Are these people doing something so bad that they need to serve a jail sentence or maybe even death sentence for their lawbreaking?

Every link, button and form in my webapp can be used with JS turned off. Every single one. This means I can write automatic bot scripts with a simple HTML parser that tests my webpages for any UI regressions and report those. That's a great help when refactoring code and guaranteeing .

However, should you have a JS-enabled browser, I simply check if the call was made with AJAX - if it was, I simply bypass rendering the entire UI and instead focus on the part that was requested. All ajax calls are made by a slightly edited regular anchor tag, like this:

Skype isn't what killed the VOIP industry. NAT and the "tiered internet" did. Once you experience the internet with no public IP addresses, well... Welcome to hell my friend. All in the name of saving a penny today and losing a dollar tomorrow.

Net Neutrality isn't just the idea of unfiltered traffic. It's the idea that everyone on the internet are peers. Sure Google have more bandwidth than me, but I can still talk to Google as a peer, not as a lower-class citizen. Even my ISP is my peer, not my master. That's the great thing about the internet.:)

If it's a device someone else built that you yourself is trying to replicate in your own environment, then it would be perfectly fine to do so. Those certifications are first and foremost intended as a safeguard measure so that device manufacturers does not sell equipment that are hazardous in any way. Electricity is, after all, not very healthy in large quantities, and neither is radiation.

However, in your home, noone can tell you what you can and can't build. A home-built device could be every bit as safe as an official one, but since it is home built, there are no guarantees a faulty soldering may, say, bypass a certain part making the product overheat and release poisonous gas. Therefore such a device may not be sold, but it may very well be built, at your own expense and risk.

That's easy. Hardware once created is permanent. Take the good old NES console - it's still the same old console now, as it was 1985. There's almost 30 years between that!

Therefore it won't be hard at all to get a consumer device CSA-certified. After all, some company is producing that device, meaning they are in control of how, when and why it is built. That doesn't change even if the hardware is open.

Open Hardware means the schematics are open for everyone to make use of. It does not mean that you can magically 3D-print your own super-awesome graphics card (atleast not yet) - it would require a lot of time and effort to create that card, even with the help of an RPM (Rapid Prototyping Machine) and open schematics. It is, however, easier to add your own stuff to the hardware and modify it to better suit your own needs, if you have the skill and inclination to do so. Doing that will void your warranty though, so watch out!

You seem to not have your facts straight. First off you are describing anarchy, and while anarchy is a nice thought anarchy can never exist naturally, it's fleeting state exists in the same way as alkali metals exists in nature. As part of a greater whole.

Secondly, your definition of anarchy is completely wrong. Allow me to fix it for you. "To them, freedom means being able to do whatever they want whenever they want in any way they want as long as it doesn't limit the freedoms of others."

From what I gather, it's not *that* bad - most apps depending on systemd do so for the cgroups support. If one could extract the cgroups functionality into a separate library and get projects to use that instead, the need for systemd would be a lot less.

Systemd is eating up everything low-level though. Before systemd, a Linux system would look like this:

And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc.:)

Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...